For decades, liberals have promoted welfare as a
“hand up, not a hand out.” Now, with the cost of American welfare
programs pushing toward $1 trillion per year, it’s time to make that
slogan a reality.

First, the depressing background.

In 1964, President Johnson declared “war” on
poverty, stating he would make Americans self-sufficient by
eliminating the causes of poverty. During the 46 years since, the
United States has fought actual wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Kosovo,
Afghanistan and Iraq again. All those wars have ended, or will end,
long before the War on Poverty will. And they’ll have cost far less.

The U.S. has spent almost $16 trillion on
means-tested welfare. Yet instead of solving the problem of poverty
by curing its causes, all that spending has made things worse. After
all these years and several generations of dependency, many families
are less capable of supporting themselves today than they were when
the War on Poverty began.

Since the second year of Johnson's "War" the
number of African-Americans on welfare increased from 27,000 to 1.6
million people. Nearly 55 percent of those on welfare are
African-Americans and an additional 20 percent are Latinos. Where
this is way out of proportion is when one considers that the black
population is 46 million compared to 200 million white persons.

With Johnson's welfare programs came an ever
vicious cycle of dependency. With the initiation of welfare
programs, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act of
1965, Johnson and the Democratic controlled Congress knowingly and
deliberately created a large segment of the population who would
forever be beholden to them for assistance in return for their
votes.

We need to break this destructive cycle. This can
be done without disenfranchising those who are truly in need of a
safety net to bring them through tough times. In a new paper from
The Heritage Foundation, poverty experts Robert Rector and Katherine
Bradley explain how to do that.

First, lawmakers need to get spending under
control. President Barack Obama’s planned budgets would be a big
step in the wrong direction. In the next decade, he intends to spend
some $10.3 trillion on programs for the poor. That would be a huge,
and permanent, increase in spending.

Instead, lawmakers should agree to cap welfare
spending at pre-recession levels. That would still add up to $16,800
per poor person in spending on benefits, and that should be more
than enough to help the needy.

Next, lawmakers should add work requirements to
major benefit programs, including food stamps and public housing
programs, that require able-bodied recipients work or prepare for
work as a condition for getting aid. This has been proposed many
times with the inevitable backlash from Democrats who believe
(albeit it quietly among themselves) that their seats would be on
the line if they required from their constiuents something in return
for cash.

When congress passed welfare reform in 1996, it
required recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to
work or to train for a job for a minimum of 30 hours per week. This
worked like magic. “Caseloads shrunk by over 60 percent, 2.8 million
families moved off the rolls and into jobs, and 1.6 million fewer
children were left in poverty,” Rector and Bradley explain.

Applying the same requirements to more welfare
programs would likely generate a similar jump in employment and
reduction in dependency.

Finally, lawmakers ought to change the incentives
that families have to remain on welfare indefinitely. One way to do
that would be to make some welfare benefits a loan that recipients
would eventually pay back.

This would accomplish two goals. It would make
welfare recipients understand that their actions, such as having
children out of wedlock, have consequences. Also, it would reduce
the total cost of welfare by creating a stream of money flowing back
from former recipients that could be used to fund future benefits.

“If such a policy were implemented throughout the
welfare system, over the long term it could reduce the high levels
of early non-marital childbearing that are a predominant cause of
poverty and dependence in American society,” Rector and Bradley
write.

This is the very opposite of how welfare programs
function today.

Consider food stamps. It’s commonly seen as a
short-term assistance program for those down on their luck. Yet half
of food stamp aid goes to individuals who have received aid for 8.5
years or more. They’re caught in a cycle of dependency, and if they
haven’t broken free after all that time, when are they ever going to
achieve independence?

It’s time for a change. Since taking office,
President Obama has almost doubled spending on food stamps and added
8 million more people to the rolls. Our country’s budget is already
in the red, and simply can’t afford to carry all those recipients
for the better part of a decade.

With the correct
reforms, welfare can once again become a hand up, and we can finally
make a popular liberal soundbite a reality.

Talk of such a reform may arise with the return
of both houses of Congress to the GOP. President Obama would most
assuredly veto it and knows Republicans would not have the votes to
override it, but at least this would lay some groundwork for the
2012 election. If runaway spending goes unchecked and tax payer
dollars continues to be poured into the bottomless pit of
entitlements and handouts, Mr. Obama will be forced into retirement
on January 20, 2013.

We believe that the Constitution of the
United States speaks for itself. There is no need to rewrite, change
or reinterpret it to suit the fancies of special interest groups or
protected classes.